@MissGayle @ashwin @ai6yr

That newsweek article only mentions one company "Dominion" (based on Toronto Canada, aka: Diebold, Sequoia, Premier, ES&S, etc) whose machines are absolutely notorious for being as secure as a wet paper bag. The government usually tries to deflect by saying they're not connected to internet, or they're protected by physical security, but that's well known to be complete BS. The bureaucrats don't understand the tech and don't know what they're talking about, just whatever their PR people tell them to read off the teleprompter.

DEF Con has an annual voting machine hacking exhibit where random people including children as young as 6 years old successfully hack these machines, often in mere seconds, with and without physical access. The bureaucrats also don't account for how these machines are secured between elections where controls over physical and networked access (eg. to update firmware) are much more lax. You can also buy them used off ebay etc often for less than $100 each if you want to develop malware for them. Where I live in Canada the local government paid well above 6 figures for security consultants to audit a list of vendors before buying, and then proceeded to ignore their verdict and bought the absolute most vulnerable machines (made by Dominion) simply because they were produced locally. They were deployed right across the country and a large proportion of the machines malfunctioned (as expected) during subsequent elections, including by reporting bogus vote tabulations. Yet the government continues to do fuck all about it.

Hackers have been warning about this shit from day one, but bureaucrats dgaf.

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/22/us-elections-hacking-voting-machines-def-con
https://odysee.com/@Qwinten:b/Kill-Chain--The-Cyber-War-on-America's-Elections-(2020):9

That said, why go to the trouble of hacking the machines when you can just hack the opinions of gullible citizens using big data, AI and access to people's social media. That's why google and facebook etc were created with CIA VC (eg. In-Q-Tel) explicitly to do in the first place. Cambridge Analytica is a good case study, but it was just a sacrificial scapegoat, one of a dime a dozen still operating in full swing.

https://archive.org/details/the.great.hack.2019.nf.webdl.dd5.1.x264ntgreducido
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIO893PtyxU

Anyway, I'd like to see your evidence that "They mercilessly went after states that had certain types of more secure voting machines", because frankly as far as I'm aware there's no such thing as a "more secure voting machine". They're all garbage, and this sounds like a massive cope to try and point the finger at orange Hitler because your party lost, when quite frankly it was entirely likely (based on the available evidence) they themselves hacked the vote in prior elections.